1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing device, an image processing method and a program.
2. Description of the Related Art
If an imaging device with a lighting device, such as a video camera, is used for image capture and an image is displayed on a display, a part where illumination light reaches and a surrounding dark part where illumination light does not reach are generated as shown in FIG. 6A. If a subject, such as a person, is near to the imaging device in an image capture environment at night-time or the like (namely, in a dark place), a subject image is blown out and appears white (in other words, highlight clipping occurs) due to reflection of the illumination light. FIG. 6A and FIG. 6B are explanatory diagrams each showing an example of an image.
In order to improve contrast of a part with a small luminance difference, such as a region formed by high luminance pixels where highlights are almost blown-out, tone correction is generally performed on an image. A known technology relating to tone correction is described, for example, in “Frédo Durand and Julie Dorsey, Fast Bilateral Filtering for the Display of High-Dynamic-Range Images, in SIGGRAPH '02: Proceedings of the 29th annual conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques (2002), pp. 257-266”. In the technology described in “Fast Bilateral Filtering for the Display of High-Dynamic-Range Images”, tone correction is performed on an image for each region or each pixel of the image.